


tuesdays, 2:30pm

by Reishiin



Category: Philosophia (Manga)
Genre: Gen, Mid-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-23 17:33:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18554515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reishiin/pseuds/Reishiin
Summary: Tuesdays at the campus corner café: coffee, cigarettes, books, and Ai.





	tuesdays, 2:30pm

**Author's Note:**

> Philosophia is told through Ai's perspective, so I've always wondered about Tomo's side of things. This is a little bit based off a poem I love (now deleted from the internet sadly), which coincidentally is also about two people meeting once a week in a coffee shop.

 

 

 

 

On a certain university campus, there is a corner café that serves coffee and pastries and that allows smoking. If you were to look through the window between 2:30 and 4:30p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon when the semester is in session, you might see two students on opposite sides of a window booth, drinking black coffee and reading, a recently used ashtray between them. The girl with long light hair will have a plain-cover book, probably nonfiction; the girl with dark hair, a paperback novel in another language.

 

* * *

 

From an outside perspective, Tomo thinks, she and Ai are very different people.

Take university, for example. Ai is a hardworking student who takes studying seriously, whereas Tomo is a slacker who skips class and then cribs notes from others. Ai wants to get out of university soon, so that she can find a job and proceed with her life, whereas Tomo wants to drag out her time here as long as possible.

 _Two different worlds_ , Tomo concludes, and takes another sip of coffee. And yet here they are, Tuesday afternoons at this corner café with two coffees and an ashtray between them.

Tomo's own life is quite simple. Sleep past morning class; attend the afternoon lecture, or go to the library. Make work calls when needed, meet and introduce new prospectives to clients, or else read till nightfall. Time passing is like a water wheel: summer, autumn, winter, and now spring. Aside from the number of layers she has to wear, Tomo doesn't much notice the seasons.

For the last half a year, once a week on Tuesdays for two hours, things have been different.

Tomo tells herself it's the company of a pretty girl that makes the café's overhead lights seem a little brighter, the café snacks a little sweeter. She tells herself that she looks forward to this weekly Tuesday rendez-vous with this junior because it's a lapse in her usual routine: a change of pace, a break in the rhythm that lets her look at the world with different eyes.

A different perspective - Ai's perspective, told to Tomo through neatly kept lecture notes in a lined notebook, in the book recommendations she takes and gives, in the way she talks about university as a stepping stone toward the future she wishes to secure for herself. It is very different from the life Tomo had chosen for herself, but Tomo respects it. Recently, she has even grown to find it interesting.

It's only two hours a week. Tomo can allow herself this. Even though Tomo is a year above, Ai will graduate before she does, surely. After that, things will return to the way they were before.

(When had she begun to think of her life in two time periods: before Ai, and now?)

Outside the café window, the afternoon sun is excruciatingly bright. Students stroll by in groups of twos and threes on their way to their next class. The sound of traffic drifts from the nearby road, punctuated at regular intervals by the calls of bush warblers.

"Springtime, eh," Ai says. She has turned her face to the window, chin resting on one hand, the other resting on the table keeping her place in her book.

"Mm, it is," Tomo replies.

(Spring suits Ai, Tomo thinks. She can wear her pink and white.)

A conclusion Tomo has reached over days of unconscious consideration: it's difficult to imagine what her life will be like without Ai there, and without Tuesday afternoons at this corner café. Tomo registers the thought. Then she carefully puts it out of her mind.

 

 

 

 


End file.
